Utah Advance Health Care: Fill & Download for Free

Spending on health care has always been higher in the USA than in other countries. It has grown on that higher base. Healthcare spending did grow a little faster in the US than other countries in the 1980’s but not in other periods. No country (maybe Singapore) has solved the problem of Healthcare spending growth.According to a panel discussion (the Panel included Robin Hanson) it is considered some people outside of the US consider advanced healthcare stuff to be a USA thing they are not willing to spend on.US citizens have more to spend on health care. See: High US health care spending is quite well explained by its high material standard of livingInterestingly healthcare spending in Arizona and Utah is in line with spending Canada. It may be a state problem do to bad or corrupt regulation(regulatory capture) in some states. See: Health Care Expenditures per Capita by State of Residence

Well, let’s see what he country is actually like now, to better define what “turn it around” means. (We can use yesterday’s report from the Richmond Fed for some updated figures.)GDP has been growing for 10 quartersRetail sales have had positive growth every month since late 2009Real disposable personal income has grown every month since the beginning of 2015Sales of autos and light trucks have been growing since late 2009Household net worth has been growing strongly since 2013Existing single-family home sales have been above the ‘90s average since 2011, and generally growing since then (though with some wild month-to-month swings this past year)New single-family home sales and housing starts are still well below the ’90s average, but have been gaining ground steadily since 2011So, in general, the economy is relatively strong and has been in expansion for ninety months, the third longest in modern history. (The recovery beginning in 1961 lasted 106 months and the recovery beginning in 1991 lasted 120 months.)To “turn the nation around” would be to plunge it into a recession. And that, indeed, is what many Trump skeptics believe his policies will do.So turning the nation around is a bad thing at this point — we need to stipulate that first.And then we turn to why “anti-Trump liberals” might not be able to complain if this horrible thing does happen. Perhaps Trump will make good on his threats to curtail the power of the press (or free speech in general), or his related vague threats to “do something” about the Internet. The most plausible scenario, then, is that Trump turns the nation around — throwing it into recession — and also makes dictatorial moves to prevent his detractors from speaking in public about his actions.Now we finally come to your question: how these “anti-Trump liberals” will react. Again, plenty of people dislike Trump and are not liberals — on the eve of his inauguration, he has historically horrible popularity/approval ratings mostly in the high thirties — so you want to focus only on the most ideologically committed opponents.Presuming they are not in re-education camps at that point, since we can’t make any assumptions about what this President might do, I expect they would be gathering in the streets in their local neighborhoods to be heard, contacting their elected representatives directly to complain, and organizing for a wave election in 2018 like no other. Again, assuming this President doesn’t find a way to eliminate that election.Edit, 9 February: I’ve written two substantial responses to comments on this answer, which have been collapsed into oblivion. So I’ll copy them here, in case they help the main answer.On the subject of the $9T national debt, raised by RB Johnson:You mean the costs of the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, the financial crash, and Medicaid Part D? And the lack of adequate federal revenue to pay for them? That could indeed be a problem, particularly if the new administration keeps its promises to spend a lot more (on defense, the “big beautiful” healthcare system that will cover everyone for everything and cost less to individuals, and so on) and slash revenue.Here’s what public debt has looked like for the last close to a hundred years. From just post-WWII through the 1970s, a bipartisan effort continuously reduced that debt. Since then, we see two Republican-controlled periods where the debt advanced, one Democratic-controlled period where the debt stabilized and was put on a downward path, and another Democratic-controlled period that saw the debt top out and just begin to decline. (Note: this chart has the usual bias of assuming that Presidents control everything, which of course isn’t actually true.)Even if debt is the biggest problem facing the US, and I would not agree that it is, I am strongly doubtful that the expressed policies of the incoming administration will make anything better. In my experience, Republicans are only deficit hawks when a Democrat is in the White House. And recent history tends to suggest that Democratic presidents lead to debt reduction, while Republican presidents lead to debt increases. Since we now have a Republican president, I would expect public debt to increase strongly over the next few years.Responding to Luciano Lombardi about the sectors and US states exhibiting job growth:For some additional facts, we can look at the BLS Employment by major industry sector report, which shows the following sectors had the greatest growth in jobs in the decade 2004-2014:Mining (4.9%)Health care and social assistance (2.3%)Educational services; private (2.2%)Agricultural wage and salary (1.9%)Leisure and hospitality (1.6%)(Mining is a surprise there, but it looks like a dead-cat bounce to me; the number of jobs is low to begin with and the long-term outlook is bad. But that increase in “health care” alone is 4 million jobs, including a lot of nurses and other well-paid folks.)Retail trade had an increase of only 0.2%; that industry has been hit hard by the rise of e-commerce. It has not recently been a strong growth sector and is not expected to be one in the future.So: “job growth has only been in retail” — that’s simply not true.(“Manufacturing continues to shrink” is absolutely correct — it’s down 1.6% in the past decade and expected to decline another 0.7%. This is primarily due to automation, and those jobs are as gone as whaling-ship deckhands.)Now let’s look at job growth by state. There’s probably a BLS report for that as well, but I wasn’t able to find it quickly. I did find a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts that specifically looks at job growth since 2008: Which States Have Created the Most Job Growth since the Great Recession?.Annoyingly, that page doesn’t have a table of the data, but among the states that have had the largest change in employment (i.e., bounced back the most) are North Dakota, Texas, Michigan, Utah, Colorado, Tennessee, and Indiana.Some coastal states have also done well — California, Florida, Washington, and Massachusetts, for example — but my own home state, the very coastal New Jersey, has a miserable 4.09% growth rate, and the very worst result is coastal Maine. (Maine, notably, has had a loose-cannon Governor for the last several years who continually picks fights with everyone around him and has extreme views…which also describes someone else I could name.)So “the job growth you speak about was only on the east and west coast” is definitely not true.Also, and somewhat related, close to a “majority of Americans” live on those coasts. The three West Coast states (Washington, Oregon, and California) have a total of just over 50 million people. The fourteen East Coast states (Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine) have more than 104 million people. That’s out of 322 million — 48% of Americans live in those states. If you added Pennsylvania as arguably coastal, we’re up to 52%. If you count the Gulf as a coast (we usually don’t, and for good reason), it’s well over two-thirds.But, most importantly: our economy is at its peak right now. We are creating a larger value of goods and services now than ever before. It’s not close; it’s not debatable.The big difference between now and 1980, and this is what frustrates people like me, is that the vast majority of the benefits of that economy are flowing more and more to a very small number of people who are already rich. Many of those people, in fact, have been nominated for Cabinet positions, and stand prepared to dismantle the federal government and profit hugely from it. They have been “turning this country around” since Reagan, and what they’ve been turning it into is a banana republic that they can own outright.

I'm not surprised at this at all. This is pretty common in every business that is plagued with monopolies and can't be simply overturned by a new competitor. Something similar already happens with education.Image source: You Are Exploited Debt-SerfsI wouldn't see the bubble bursting as a catastrophe at all. Long-term economic bubbles are unnatural. While it would be bad in the short term, over the long term it has to happen, and it's better for everybody because it should mean drastically falling costs -- I'd venture about an 60% to 80% drop in costs, based on a few back-of-the-envelope calculations I've done. See my answer to Medicine and Healthcare: What are the ways to contain medical costs in the US without a single payer system?Incidentally, with a 60-80% drop in cost, most people could afford basic health care out of pocket, and insurance for bank-breaking events would be cheap enough to be a non-starter in employment benefits negotiation.What's going on right now -- there being a bubble -- is the catastrophe. It is the reason why some 15 million Americans find themselves uninsured and our health care expenses stack up to a cool 1/5th of the economy. It's the reason why medical expenses top the pareto chart of reasons for bankruptcy. (In advance of those who point out that medical expenses are only a small portion of total debt these bankrupt people had, I'm fully well aware of that, but it's like the straw that broke the camel's back, and most of them probably had their debts under control prior to medical expenses).To fix it, ultimately it has to come down to one thing:Taking the concentration of power out of the hands of monopolies and cartels, and putting it back in the hands of the people.Kaiser Permanente has an excellent model -- the hospitals sell their own "insurance," meaning you pay them a fixed monthly fee for virtually unlimited care. It drives them to have to reduce costs in order to compete with insurance companies.The state of Utah also has an excellent model -- they rejected the Certificate of need laws and have a very wide set of major medical providers. In Salt Lake County alone there are 3 major independent networks that compete on cost and quality (and yes, they compete on price as most Utahns are on high deductible plans, which plans mandate that providers can only charge what the insurer actually pays) -- Mountain Star, Intermountain, and the University of Utah, and in other counties there are many others as well. In at least 35 other states, each locality has one and only one hospital network, and entry to the field requires that hospital network's permission. Utah's costs are the absolute lowest in the country and the state has among the highest quality ratings.There are plenty of other models as well -- all of which, in order to be successful, either require a competitive aspect to push prices down and quality up, or the largest buyer engaging in a real negotiation process. (In the US, that would be Medicare, but Medicare doesn't negotiate, the prices are just set by the heads of the AMA). Unfortunately it seems the US government and the Medical-Industrial complex is doing its darndest to make sure those solutions are as limited as possible.